I just heard the good news that the Medieval and Post-Medieval Interest Group of the AIA has had a panel accepted at the 2011 AIA. The proposal is from David Pettegrew (the Interest Group president from 2008-2010) and Amelia Brown (current president 2010-). I'll post updates on the panel including the abstracts for the papers and hopefully the podcasts of the actual panel over at our Pendentive Blog.
Here's the abstract for the entire colloquium session and the paper titles. Looks like a great panel.
"Travel to Greece between Antiquity and the Grand Tour"
Two sets of travel texts have consistently formed the backdrop to archaeological interpretations of ancient Greek sites and landscapes: Pausanias's 2nd-century Description of Greece and early modern accounts of western Europeans, who themselves often wrote with an awareness of Pausanias. Throughout most of the 20th century, archaeologists attempted to relate these texts to the new discoveries of excavation and survey, while in very recent years scholars have sought to understand these accounts, and the landscapes they represent, in terms of their particular social and intellectual contexts. In general, however, there has been very little research on travel to Greece between Pausanias and the start of the Grand Tour, despite the growing recognition that interregional communication continued uninterrupted between the 3rd and 17th centuries, both in Greece and in the Mediterranean more broadly. Indeed, the textual evidence for Late Antique, Byzantine, and Ottoman travel to Greece is greater than is often realized as historians, geographers, imperial functionaries, sailors, merchants, students, Hellenes, Christian pilgrims, monks, ‘barbarian invaders,’ refugees, pirates, Crusaders, knights, and armies, among many others, visited the peninsula and islands of Greece. It is true that most of these travelers did not (or even could not) record their visits to Greek lands in writing, but the extant textual evidence is not insubstantial. Some educated travelers followed ancient writers and prefigured the Grand Tourists by recording their interest in the monuments of classical antiquity while others ignored the classical past and sought places associated with St. Paul and Christian holy men and women, or viewed sites unaware of either Christian or classical pasts. The textual evidence itself exists in the context of an ever-expanding body of material culture of Late Antique to Ottoman date produced by both urban excavation and regional survey. In this colloquium, we analyze the varied written sources for different kinds of travel into, within, and around Greece between the 3rd and 17th centuries together with the regional archaeological evidence to illuminate landscapes from Late Antiquity to the Ottoman era. Our goal is to combine both kinds of evidence to better understand post-antique travel and the sites and landscapes visited before the Early Modern era.
Papers
"Intellectuals on the Isthmus of Greece,"
David K. Pettegrew, Messiah College
"Christian Pilgrimage to Byzantine Corinth,"
Amelia R. Brown, University of Queensland
"Two Italian Travelers on Karpathos in 1923 and c 1423, and an archaeological explanation for Sorzadori,"
D.J. Ian Begg, Trent University
“'To tell you something very special': Cyriaco of Ancona in Greece,”
Diana Gilliland Wright, Independent Scholar
"Athens through Ottoman Eyes."
Pierre A. MacKay, University of Washington
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